"The speed isn't dropping! If anything, it feels like we're getting faster every time we punch through a wave!"
"Fickle winds and the currents of a strait are nothing more than splashing in a puddle before boiling steam at 150 atmospheres."
I answered leisurely from the wheelhouse, hands on the helm.
It was an insane high-speed voyage that crushed Mother Nature beneath sheer force—something that would have been impossible even with a hundred galleys in the past.
This steel paddle steamer, belching black smoke, thrust its grotesque prow into Masina Harbor, the largest hub in the southern part of the continent, only two days after departing Pelua.
Bwoooooooom—!!
The rough blast of the ship's horn, like the roar of a beast, shook all of Masina Harbor.
The merchants and guards of the Southern Alliance, who had been filling the docks while waiting for the winds of the strait, nearly drew their weapons in terror at the sight of the bizarre ghost ship charging against the strait's rapids, spewing black smoke and fire without a single mast.
But when the ship docked at the pier and dazzlingly white cotton cloth—enough to fill hundreds of freight wagons—came pouring out, their fear soon turned to astonishment and explosive cheers.
"It's the Carnoble mark! The Carnoble Merchant Company of Pelua has brought goods to Masina!"
"Impossible! I heard the northern sea was becalmed and no ships could sail! And they've already arrived after breaking through the savage currents of this strait?!"
"They arrived a full fifteen days ahead of schedule! And the volume is twice what was promised!"
The trap Valerius had set by blocking the land trade routes, which had nearly forced us to pay penalties for breach of contract, was utterly smashed apart by the brute force of a steamship that tore across the sea in two days and landed at Masina, the greatest trading port of the south.
"Now! We've brought every last promised item without the slightest discrepancy! Pay the balance minus the advance—right now, in cash!"
Aila disembarked confidently, her red hair fluttering, and browbeat the merchants.
The quality was perfect, and the delivery was absurdly fast.
The southern merchants stood with their mouths hanging open, then brought carts loaded with gold coins and poured them out at Aila's feet.
"Splendid! As expected of the Carnoble and Golden Fleece alliance! Let us sign the next contract at once!"
Amid the cascading waterfall of clinking gold coins, Aila smiled in rapture.
"Did you see that, Elpanso? We did it! Not only did we escape the penalty trap, we swallowed up the southern market's supply whole! When that old Valerius hears this, he'll clutch the back of his neck and collapse, won't he?"
Aila hugged a heavy pouch of gold coins to her chest, practically jumping for joy.
But I leaned against the wheelhouse with a cigar in my mouth and stared out at the sea with cold, sunken eyes.
"Aila. It's too early to celebrate."
"Huh? Why? We paid off all the debt and earned this much money."
I exhaled a long stream of tobacco smoke and jerked my chin toward the empty cargo hold.
"It's true we made money, since we sold all the goods. But what are you going to do about the 'cotton' we'll need to weave the next batch of cotton cloth?"
"Ah……."
Aila's bright expression froze in an instant.
The situation remained unchanged: Valerius had bought off the great plantation owners of the southern Rom Peninsula and cornered the cotton market.
Without materials to feed the machines, our factory would have no choice but to stop, even if we had earned gold coins for the moment.
"Th-then we need to take these gold coins to the southern plantation owners right away and buy the cotton back, even if we have to pay the penalties for them……."
"Don't be stupid. Do you think Valerius did that because he has less money than us? If we offer double, he'll offer ten times as much. We can't beat him with capital in a resource war inside the Rom Peninsula."
"Then what do we do?! If we don't have materials, the machines will stop!"
As Aila stamped her feet, I spun the helm hard and turned the ship's bow.
The massive paddle wheels overturned the seawater, and the prow slowly took aim beyond the Rom Peninsula, toward the open sea to the "east."
"So we simply go outside, where his money can't reach."
"East? By east, you mean…… the empire of the heretics!"
Aila cried out, her face deathly pale.
Beyond the sea to the east.
That was where the Osean Empire lurked—a massive hegemonic state that denied the God of Light worshiped by the nations of the Rom Peninsula, including Pelua, and served their own heretical faith.
The western nations that served the God of Light and the Osean Empire had hated each other for centuries, waging bloody wars.
Though merchants sometimes traded in secret across religious lines for the sake of money, that sea route was a terrible deathtrap swarming with imperial galleys and pirates.
"Are you insane?! You're going to steer this ship into the waters off that brutal empire?! And besides, how long would it take to go all the way to the distant East and back! If we want to return to the factory before the materials run out……."
"We won't be late. And we aren't going to the imperial mainland."
I placed a black, oil-stained finger on the sea chart spread out in the wheelhouse.
An island floating in the middle of the eastern sea.
A frontline where the Osean Empire and the western kingdoms fiercely fought over territory, and a dazzling treasure house where, thanks to its warm climate, the most vast cotton fields on the entire continent stretched out.
"Kipro Island."
At my declaration, Aila sucked in a sharp breath.
Kipro Island.
It was certainly the continent's largest cotton-producing region, but even the merchants of Pelua were reluctant to import its cotton in bulk.
The distance was so great that a round trip took more than half a year, and there was the extreme risk that the heretic empire's galleys might seize them at any moment.
The safe common sense was to use cotton from within the Rom Peninsula, even if it was expensive.
Valerius, too, was trapped by that common sense.
He must have been convinced that if he took away the cotton of the Rom Peninsula, we would starve to death.
Because with sailing ships dependent on the wind, there was no way to go to Kipro Island and back before the factory stopped!
"But Aila."
I shouted toward the dwarves, who were shoveling coal madly into the furnace.
"This black steel monster doesn't need half a year. In just 'two weeks,' it can make a round trip through those savage eastern seas with time to spare."
Overwhelming mobility.
That was the true terror brought by a technological revolution.
"If he dries up every well inside the walls, then we just cross the sea and dig up an entirely different well."
"Ten days…… We're going to sweep up Kipro Island's cotton……."
Aila's pupils trembled wildly.
Fear and dread lasted only a moment before the greed of a great merchant, embedded deep in her bones, began to boil fiercely.
Kipro Island's cotton was less than half the price of cotton from the Rom Peninsula.
If the risks of transport, time, and pirates could be solved, it was an island of gold where costs could be slashed exponentially.
"……Hey."
Aila swallowed hard and approached the bow.
"So, those cotton fields on Kipro Island…… they're said to produce five times the total output of the entire Rom Peninsula, right?"
"Probably about that much."
"Then."
Aila grinned and clenched her fist.
A demonic ambition to dominate Pelua flashed in her eyes.
"Wouldn't it be a bit of a waste to use all this gold we raked in from selling to the south just to buy cotton for our own factory? If we buy up Kipro's cotton down to the roots, as much as we can load onto the ship, and return to Pelua……."
"All the textile workshops in Pelua will come bowing to us to buy cotton. And the Rom Peninsula cotton Valerius bought at a high price will become worthless."
At my answer, Aila burst into uproarious laughter.
"Puahahaha! Good! Let's act crazy and go, to the East! I can't wait to see how that old Valerius's face twists!"
"Full speed ahead!"
I opened the valve at the control seat all the way.
Chiiiiiiik—!! Kwaaaaaang!!
The flames of the furnace blazed like a waterfall, and 150-atmosphere mana steam hammered the pistons.
The giant paddle wheels on both sides of the ship roared as they crushed the seawater, and the steamship shot explosively away from the Rom Peninsula toward the eastern sea, drawing a thick trail of black smoke into the sky.
A gray world where the God of Light was silent and the sun was split.
Across it rang an arrogant whistle that would tear apart every common sense of this fantasy world.
"Bwoooooooom----!!!"
It was the moment the eastern trade route was forced open by steel and steam.
*
The top floor of a red-roofed mansion overlooking Masina Harbor.
Count Lorenzo, a bigwig of the Southern Alliance who controlled the flow of goods through the Masina Strait and a major figure in back-alley moneylending, dropped the wineglass in his hand as he stared at the bizarre scene unfolding outside the window.
Clang—!
"Wh-what in the world is that…… Why is a ship without sails moving on its own and docking at the pier!"
Lorenzo's face had gone pale, without a trace of blood.
Before his eyes, the hundreds of wagonloads of cotton cloth disgorged by Carnoble's black steamship were piling up like mountains on the pier, while the southern merchants cheered and poured gold coins onto Aila.
If he had no stake in the matter, he could simply have celebrated one merchant's success with joy.
But to Lorenzo, it was no different from the gallows where his own neck would soon hang.
"Th-this can't be! Head Merchant Valerius clearly guaranteed it! He said he had blocked everything, and that the Carnoble Merchant Company could never arrive in Masina by the deadline!"
Lorenzo screamed, tearing at his own hair.
As one of Valerius's puppets, he had used this incident to design a demonic "derivative product" that would not merely bankrupt Carnoble, but multiply his own wealth dozens of times over.
It was the so-called accumulation of [Claims for Compensation Due to Breach of Contract].
If Carnoble was trapped in Pelua and failed to bring the goods on time, the southern merchants would gain the "right to claim penalties" from Carnoble amounting to three times the contract price.
But from the merchants' perspective, they feared that if Carnoble went bankrupt, even those penalties would become worthless scraps of paper they could never collect.
Lorenzo had exploited precisely that psychology.
"If Carnoble defaults, your penalty claims will also become trash. So I will buy all those claims from you now, in cash, at ten percent of their face value."
In order to reduce their losses even a little, the southern merchants had rushed to sell their penalty claims against Carnoble to Lorenzo at bargain prices.
Lorenzo's calculations had been perfect.
Once Valerius strangled Carnoble in Pelua, Lorenzo intended to mobilize Masina's lordly troops, seize all remaining assets of the Carnoble Merchant Company and its factory in Pelua, and forcibly monopolize the compensation at face value.
'Tsk, tsk, you fools. The factory where that Carnoble bastard produces unlimited cotton cloth is the most valuable core asset!'
Such technology, unattainable with mere petty cash, was the true source of wealth and capital.
That was why Lorenzo had begun this gamble.
A mad gamble with a guaranteed return, one that could not possibly fail.
Blinded by greed, Lorenzo had swept up every last Carnoble penalty bond on the market, even putting up his mansion, his merchant fleet, and enormous usurious loans from the dark guild.
And yet.
"They arrived…… And fifteen days ahead of schedule, at that!"